..The experiments demonstrate people's ability to successfully modulate their environmental sampling in the face of uncertainty due to lower cause-effect probabilities, but not in the presence of longer cause-effect delays...

..The results suggest that altering a cause's ability to predict when the effect would occur (via a spatial marker) and the presence of a conduit for energy transmission have independent effects on causal judgements of object interaction...

..Both discriminations proved difficult for the pigeons to master; later tests suggested that the pigeons often learned the discriminations by attending to subtle stimulus properties other than the intended ones...

Stimulus control by same-versus-different relations among multiple visual stimuli

..The discussion concludes with an analysis of exemplar models (e.g., Pearce, 1994) of human causal learning and considers the conditions under which these models do and do not anticipate our results...

Display variability and spatial organization as contributors to the pigeon's discrimination of complex visual stimuli

..Statistical models confirmed and quantified the importance of these additional factors...

Same-different conceptualization by baboons (Papio papio): the role of entropy

E A WassermanDepartment of Psychology, University of Iowa and Center for Research in Cognitive Neurosciences, Iowa City 52242 1407, USAJ Comp Psychol 115:42-52. 2001

..Finally, in Experiments 4 and 5, the baboons' responses to displays that contained jittered and blurred icons suggested that their same-different conceptual behavior was not based on the spatial orderliness of the visual arrays...

Learning an object from multiple views enhances its recognition in an orthogonal rotational axis in pigeons

..Explicitly informing participants about the nature of the objects had a strong impact. Experience with the causal task affected ratings to a greater extent when the objects were explicitly described as nonliving rather than living...

..Evidently, the recognition of occluded objects requires pigeons to learn to discriminate the object from the occluder; once this discrimination is mastered, occluded objects can be better recognized...

..This study also has prompted the development of a theory-the Finding Differences Model-that successfully explains a wealth of findings in the comparative psychology of same-different discrimination behavior...

Variability discrimination in humans and animals: implications for adaptive action

..Discovering and understanding the behavioral and neural processes related to stimulus variability and its consequences for behavior offer distinctive challenges and important new opportunities for psychologists and neuroscientists...

..The findings were consistent with the heuristic comparison account, which suggests that the judged likelihood of a focal outcome will be disproportionately influenced by the strength (frequency) of the strongest alternative outcome...